Raoul Wallenberg

Raoul Wallenberg (4 August 1912-17 July 1947) was a Swedish diplomat who, during World War II, saved 30,000 Hungarian Jews from the Holocaust.

Biography
Raoul Wallenberg was born in Lidingo, Sweden in 1912; he was one-sixteenth Jewish, and he was proud of his ancestry. Born into a family of financiers, he graduated from the University of Michigan in 1935 and established a Swedish export business together with Kalman Lauer, a Hungarian Jew. Given the nature of the business, he often travelled to German-occupied Europe. In 1944, after the Nazi occupation of Hungary, he took action to try and save the Jewish population there from near-certain death in the Nazi concentration camps. Through the Swedish legation at Budapest, he designed a special passport and set up thirty "safe" houses whose residents were covered by diplomatic immunity. Through his contacts, bribery, and his sheer personality he managed to persuade the Germans to leave the houses untouched. Directly or indirectly, he thus saved the lives of over 30,000 Jews. When Soviet troops occupied Hungary, he was taken to their army headquarters and disappeared. His whereabouts have attracted continued speculation, with Soviet reports about his death in 1947 being contradicted by later sightings. In May 1996, it emerged that, while in Budaepst, he had also been supplying US intelligence through the Swedish embassy about the state of the Hungarian resistance movement. Consequently, he had been arrested by the USSR as a US spy, which both the USA and Sweden ignored in embarrassment. He became an honorary citizen of the USA, Canada, and Israel in absentia, and a tree in Jerusalem's "avenue of the righteous" comemmorates his courage and sacrifice for the Jewish people.